Welcome to Oneiric Ocelot Alpha 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 11.10.

Pre-releases of Oneiric Ocelot are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the Oneiric development cycle.

Alpha 2 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs. For a more detailed description of the changes in the Alpha 2 release and the known bugs (which can save you the effort of reporting a duplicate bug, or help you find proven workarounds)

I prefer to do it my way without using the $iso set because I can upload my 40_custom master template to all my testing computers without having to edit the code to reflect whatever the hd0 is. As long as all my iso files are in the /boot directory, the Iso’s will load flawlessly.

So although your code does work and is perhaps a little geekier, my coding works with me testing multiple computers without having to update each testing computers grub code.

Note that I am using the amd-64 version of the ISO and I had issues because the filename is specified in more than 1 point in the config – hence why the variable was used.

However, I didn’t need to specify the device name (hd0,*). I don’t know if it matters, but I don’t have a separate /boot partition.

That being said, I can see this technique being really useful for creating a USB stick with a few different distributions on it – just download the relevant ISO file, copy/paste the menu entry, and specify the correct path to the file name.